Cosabella, a family-owned Italian lingerie company, has leveraged technology to allow its people to focus on creativity instead of wasting time on tedious tasks. By parting ways with its ad agency and teaming up with marketing cloud company Emarsys, Cosabella was able to free up the marketing team’s time and generate a 60% lift in email-led revenue in 2016 compared to 2015, plus an uptick in its subscriber base. A true win-win.
“When we [parted ways with our ad agency], we said we don’t want to bring in more in-house talent,” said Courtney Connel, Marketing Director for Cosabella in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Instead, we wanted to leverage the talent that we have and use smart programs and artificial intelligence to fill the gaps.”
Connel believes strategic use of AI can help brands like Cosabella achieve higher levels of personalization and customer engagement.
Advertisement
“Imagine walking into the nicest department store in New York and they know who you are and what you want,” she continued. “They really go out of their way to make it frictionless for you to find exactly what you need. I think that’s what artificial intelligence is kind of doing in the tech space now. Also, by freeing up the time, it’s making it more emotional. We’re able to create more emotional content at the same time, which makes the experience better overall.”
To deliver that emotional, better experience, Cosabella needed a solution that would provide better engagement and blaue for both its B2C and B2B customers. After an extensive search, Cosabella chose the Emarsys Suite — including Automation, Predict Wed Extend, Smart Insight and CRM Ads products. The company also leveraged Emarsys artificial intelligence (AI) to enable the marketing automation platform to enhance customer engagement and acquisition and improve conversion growth.
“Our customers have to navigate a dynamic, but crowded luxury retail landscape to find a product that offers both style and comfort,” said Connel. “It is therefore critical for us to have an intelligent marketing partner to help us cut through the noise and engage effectively with our customers across different channels. Emarsys defines true personalization and effective cross-channel automation, and is delivering a major uptick in new customers, and unlocking previously hidden avenues of revenue creation.”
Living Content Vs. Dead Content
Before Emarsys, Cosabella had team members evaluating spreadsheets to figure out which emails performed great and which didn’t. “We also couldn’t leverage the data outside of email,” said Connel. “We had all this great data, but didn’t know what to do with it.”
With Emarsys, Cosabella was able to leverage the data across advertising, on site merchandising and beyond. The company was also positioned to create a template that cut the time required to launch campaigns. In fact, Connel said the template was one of the things she fell in love with, and that the team was able to cut its campaign launch time by 50%. “That freed up a ton of my team’s time where they can do things they love,” she said.
For example, the extra time allowed Cosabella’s Director of Communications to create more lifestyle content with unique angles to share with customers. This was helpful for the brand because Connel said the brand wants to create “living content.”
“What I would consider dead content is something that is already typed out and can’t change,” she said. “Even though we had the capability of creating living content, a lot of it remains static on our web site. We’re really working on allowing everything to be dynamic — from our emails to merchandising and every single component of the site — so the experience is easier.”